Seems their plan is for public posts to be $1/post but "Posts among friends will always be free."
I imagine if they become successful they can look into lowering the public post price depending on a person's region. Let's leave aside how they'll go about determining that, VPNs, and such; that's something for the future.
But doesn't that get rid of the social aspect of "Social Media"? People like being able to comment on things - but why should they have to pay to do so? Just because someone isn't willing to pay doesn't mean that what they've got to say isn't worthwhile, and vice versa. I think a pay-to-post/free to consume setup would result in a spammy, advert ridden service, that would quickly die.
I'd love to see a social platform where your followers see what you post for free, but you have to pay for anyone for comments else to see it (that goes for comments too). Advertisers would be treated no different than any other poster. Everyone would get a portion of the money that was paid to show them content. You could set your own threshold for what it cost for someone to show you something.
We might see the creation of syndicates where you pay $10 a month for access to Collection of Sites A and $5 for Collection of Sites B, etc.
Maybe A will have major newspapers as members and B will have most small town papers, and C will have tech blogs and D will have right-wing political blogs, or something. The fee gets divided up between the members based on page views.
Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.
I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.
Funnily enough I'm of the opposite mind: users free and developers paying something like $50/month. I'd imagine placing such a price barrier there would vastly cut down on the abuse that twitter, for example, has to put up with.
The cost to post (just an upload) is going to be a lot smaller in the long run than the cost for people to view popular content (tons and tons of bandwidth, some db access, etc.). So it's kind of a weird model to charge for posting or contributing. Really you'd want to charge for time spent viewing... and then you've basically invented AOL again.
Just to add to the brainstorm: they could charge users who have over, say, 5k followers a monthly fee to reach 100% of the audience instead of some arbitrary mix of them. The fee would increase with the # of followers.
It's in the spirit of, but not exactly like, Facebook charging businesses to reach more of their followers by "boosting" posts.
It would align the fees with the users who value most directly from using the service as a mass media broadcast device -- a lot of whom are businesses or quasi-businesses. They could waive fees for governments, educational institutions, non-profits, whatever.
This is likely true, but it doesn't scale. What if I want to participate say to 100 blogs, do I have to pay $100/month just for subscription?
Some central authority might be created to make things much easier, but then we would be back to square one with big corporations owning people's data and all related privacy concerns.
Not to criticize that possible solution, as I also agree with it in principle, but it is probably much harder to implement well than it looks, and should be created from scratch with scalability in mind: micropayments per post probably are the best option, which if applied to email too would eliminate spam in seconds, although that would also sound like admitting the defeat of the Internet as we knew it.
I would like to see a pay per post model to access content from certain writers or certain collections. There is a lot of technical content shared on Medium that is really valuable, and most definitely worth paying for. I would much rather see the writers decide what of their content is worth charging for and what should be free versus Medium making this decision for the community.
There are indeed trade-offs, and I'm aware that most people would prefer to post for free. However, I believe the 100% free model is not sustainable, and it's worth experimenting with different approaches. Companies providing these types of services tend to become hostile towards their users over time in order to pay their bills, resorting to selling personal data, holding user-generated content hostage, or cluttering their websites with ads.
Charging a small transaction fee to the user might also have some advantages: it discourages spam and encourages more thoughtful posting. And we're talking about an amount that is trivial for most users.
Regarding speed, Algorand provides transaction finality in under 4 seconds, which is one of the main reasons I believe it's a good fit for this project. Creating a post or comment is a bit slower than posting on Hacker News, but it still feels pretty fast.
As for scalability, I'd say let's cross that bridge when we get there. Currently, Metapost is only publishing text posts to the blockchain. Hosting things like images or videos would be better suited for IPFS, with only the links being published on the chain.
Maybe, but is that the plan (make it open to everyone)? And even then, will any normal people actually pay 240USD a year just to not be easily filtered out? I am a well off western tech junky and I won't feel any need to break out my credit card.
At best this seems like a nice way to charge very rich or corporate backed users for the service twitter currently gives them for free...
I imagine if they become successful they can look into lowering the public post price depending on a person's region. Let's leave aside how they'll go about determining that, VPNs, and such; that's something for the future.
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